Four Days

Fifty years ago, when President John Kennedy was assassinated, the days between his assassination on Thursday, November 22nd and his burial on Sunday, November 25th were often referred to as the “Four Days” – the four days that a nation was in mourning and that, for most Americans alive at the time, will be forever seared in their individual and collective memory. I was eleven at the time and living in Dallas so the memories are vivid, indeed. All those photographs and TV archives that have already been airing on CNN and other news outlets were part of my real world experiences during my pre-teen years in Dallas. And, the reference to “Four Days” and all that happened during those days is also part of my memory.

I will leave it to today’s news commentators to reflect on President Kennedy’s assassination and all that came with the tragic day in our nation’s history.

As this special anniversary approached, I was putting the “Four Days” into another context – that context is the seven days of traditional mourning for a Jewish family. While John Kennedy was Catholic, I’ve often thought about mourning rituals of other faiths and realized how profound are the mourning rituals of Judaism – seven days of mourning following burial with significant restrictions on what one can do and not do, an additional thirty days of mourning when some of those restrictions are lifted and, when mourning for a parent, an entire eleven months of mourning – also with various rules as to how that period should be observed.

When my father died almost five years ago, I observed many of the rituals of Jewish mourning – “sitting shiva” (the first seven days), observing “Shloshim” (the next thirty days) and then the eleven months, that included reciting certain prayers on a daily basis. These rituals provide a window of healing and circumspection at a time when one’s personal world has become unhinged – and particularly so when you lose a parent. As I’ve observed my non-Jewish friends and acquaintances going through their own faith observance regarding the death of a loved one, I’m often puzzled by how quickly they re-enter society – sometimes as if nothing has happened. And that re-entry process reinforces, for me, the sanctity of the Jewish rituals.

And, so as we prepare to observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, we should all pause to not just remember the killing of an American president during some of our lifetimes. We should consider how our own faith traditions frame a mourning period when each of us loses a loved one.